Zero Spaces: Professor Ranulph Glanville

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Professor Ranulph Glanville (1946–2014) was a superstar cybernetician, design thinker, architect, artist and musician with three PhDs, the first of which was supervised by Gordon Pask, one of the godfathers of cybernetics. Innovation Design Engineering commissioned the film Zero Spaces to commemorate his contribution to the programme and its thinking.

From 2008–2014, Professor Glanville was Research Professor for
Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) where he supported the growth of the
research group by introducing an international network of design thinkers and
researchers. Based on his global experience of stimulating and developing
design research cultures, Glanville helped to build a transitional PhD culture,
which welcomes candidates from diverse backgrounds eager to engage with design
research while building on their own experience and insights.

Glanville
was awarded his first PhD in Cybernetics from Brunel University in 1975 and his
second in Human Learning in 1987. In 2006 Brunel awarded him the highest degree of DSc in Cybernetics
and Design. He began his teaching career at the Architectural
Association (1971–8), followed by Portsmouth
Polytechnic (1978–96). At the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
University in Australia and Saint-Lucas School of Architecture in
Belgium, he helped to develop doctoral programmes based in architecture and
design practice. He was appointed Senior Professor of Research Design at
LUCA in Belgium.

For 20
years, Glanville wrote a regular column alongside other articles for the
journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing,
and he was the first European to be elected to
the prestigious position of President of
the American Society for Cybernetics in 2008. Second order cybernetics
was central to Glanville’s landscape of thinking, and was something he infused into
IDE. Rather than championing the disconnected objective observer, cybernetics
acknowledges the inherently active role of the observer. This strengthened and
enriched the practice-based design research approach within IDE, by seeing the
observer as an essential inclusion in the reflective feedback loop.

In 1984 RCA Rector Jocelyn Stephens closed Bruce
Archer’s Department of Design Desearch, temporarily halting the RCA’s
pioneering work in design research that had developed since the 1960s. The appointment
of Glanville signalled a reconnection to that ambition, to once again push the
boundaries of research and design thinking. His arrival allowed IDE to develop
some of the unexplored terrain and new relevancies that have emerged through
new societal and technological developments.

The impact of his time at the RCA can be described
tenderly as a process of ‘infusing Ranulphness’. The lack of rules or rigid
structure within IDE research gave Glanville license to practice his approach
to learning, developed throughout his cross-disciplinary career.

About six months before he passed away, Glanville
revealed to the IDE research group that he had a terminal condition, which
prompted them to embark on a project with film director Delmar Mavignier to
capture ‘Ranulphness’ through a series of interviews.

The resultant film, Zero Spaces, takes its cue from
the Mayan concept of a space between the interior and outside world. The film
itself is a sophisticated combination of design thinking exemplar, research in
action, memorial and design provocation. Interviews with the PhD candidates
Glanville supervised and footage of him leading seminars, offer an insight into
his thought processes and enlightened approach to teaching.

Glanville
considered cybernetics and design as opposite
sides of the same coin. Discussing their relationship in the film he states: ‘Design
is about bringing that which we don’t have into being, and it always involves
this moving from not knowing to knowing. But it’s also a process of creating
something, which we can then explain as if it were part of a logical process.
So we can give it a causality, but it doesn’t have that causality as we make
it, the causality is a post rationalisation.’